Published: Monday, December 10, 2012 at 5:55 p.m.

Last Modified: Monday, December 10, 2012 at 5:55 p.m.

Sarasota County pays area plumbers to do annual inspections of safety devices that keep contaminated water from reaching faucets in homes.

As far as I know, they may do a good job checking most of the 16,800 Sarasota County homes that have the devices, called backflow preventers.

Of course, if some plumbers were faking the inspections, that would be a health hazard as well as a ripoff. I'd expect fraud charges if a contractor was found to have been running a scam in which people were charged for inspections that never happened.

But what if the county itself is running such a scam?

Though it presumably has been unintentional and maybe unknown — or was at first — that's more or less what has been going on in Sarasota County.

As I wrote just over a week ago, a Turtle Rock resident's questions about his utility bill brought this issue to my attention. He told me about getting a surprise refund of about $118 because his questions led to the discovery that his home's backflow preventer had not been inspected for four years.

A county spokesman said it appears contractors were never given his address as an inspection site.

An isolated event? Not so much, it seems. The same column also reported that other homes could have the same thing going on. Anyone paying that monthly fee could find the last inspection date on a small sticker placed near the home's backflow preventer. It is typically on a pipe that is a foot above the ground, in an inverted-U shape, usually where county waterlines meet private property.

Sure enough, on Monday, eight days after that column appeared, county resident Pauline Swan told me she is getting a $141 credit because she read the column and called.

Her house apparently went more than four years without a supposedly annual backflow inspection.

And a county spokesman, Curt Preisser, told me the public works department got more than 70 calls from utility customers about this issue in the past week, and has identified 28 customers entitled to similar refunds.

The thing is, there could well be far more. Most people don't know to ask, or check. And yet they could be at risk, theoretically, for drinking water contaminated with sewage unless we assume the annual inspections are a bogus requirement and a needless expense, as some prefer to think.

Government can't have it both ways. Since it requires the inspections for health and safety reasons, and charges for them, it is a serious matter if public works administrators know numerous homes must have backflow devices that have not been inspected for years, and know there has been no reliable system for identifying them.

Preisser told me more than a week ago that public works staff was beginning to grapple with some problematic software to try to determine how many such homes there are, and how many are being billed anyway. On Monday he said that process was still proving to be difficult and that he still didn't have so much as a ballpark estimate.

Preisser said County Administrator Randall Reid is also waiting for that number, which could be available in a few more days after much hand-checking of computer data.

I hope Reid will ask his public works administrators a tough question:

Since the county has been getting sporadic calls for two or three years about backflow inspections that were billed but never took place — as Preisser has acknowledged — why did searching the computer files to see who is at risk for drinking sewage only become a priority after a newspaper column about it?

Tom Lyons can be contacted at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com or (941) 361-4964.

<p>Sarasota County pays area plumbers to do annual inspections of safety devices that keep contaminated water from reaching faucets in homes.</p><p>As far as I know, they may do a good job checking most of the 16,800 Sarasota County homes that have the devices, called backflow preventers.</p><p>Of course, if some plumbers were faking the inspections, that would be a health hazard as well as a ripoff. I'd expect fraud charges if a contractor was found to have been running a scam in which people were charged for inspections that never happened.</p><p>But what if the county itself is running such a scam?</p><p>Though it presumably has been unintentional and maybe unknown — or was at first — that's more or less what has been going on in Sarasota County.</p><p>As I wrote just over a week ago, a Turtle Rock resident's questions about his utility bill brought this issue to my attention. He told me about getting a surprise refund of about $118 because his questions led to the discovery that his home's backflow preventer had not been inspected for four years.</p><p>A county spokesman said it appears contractors were never given his address as an inspection site.</p><p>An isolated event? Not so much, it seems. The same column also reported that other homes could have the same thing going on. Anyone paying that monthly fee could find the last inspection date on a small sticker placed near the home's backflow preventer. It is typically on a pipe that is a foot above the ground, in an inverted-U shape, usually where county waterlines meet private property.</p><p>Sure enough, on Monday, eight days after that column appeared, county resident Pauline Swan told me she is getting a $141 credit because she read the column and called.</p><p>Her house apparently went more than four years without a supposedly annual backflow inspection.</p><p>And a county spokesman, Curt Preisser, told me the public works department got more than 70 calls from utility customers about this issue in the past week, and has identified 28 customers entitled to similar refunds.</p><p>The thing is, there could well be far more. Most people don't know to ask, or check. And yet they could be at risk, theoretically, for drinking water contaminated with sewage unless we assume the annual inspections are a bogus requirement and a needless expense, as some prefer to think.</p><p>Government can't have it both ways. Since it requires the inspections for health and safety reasons, and charges for them, it is a serious matter if public works administrators know numerous homes must have backflow devices that have not been inspected for years, and know there has been no reliable system for identifying them.</p><p>Preisser told me more than a week ago that public works staff was beginning to grapple with some problematic software to try to determine how many such homes there are, and how many are being billed anyway. On Monday he said that process was still proving to be difficult and that he still didn't have so much as a ballpark estimate.</p><p>Preisser said County Administrator Randall Reid is also waiting for that number, which could be available in a few more days after much hand-checking of computer data.</p><p>I hope Reid will ask his public works administrators a tough question:</p><p>Since the county has been getting sporadic calls for two or three years about backflow inspections that were billed but never took place — as Preisser has acknowledged — why did searching the computer files to see who is at risk for drinking sewage only become a priority after a newspaper column about it?</p><p><i>Tom Lyons can be contacted at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com or (941) 361-4964.</i></p>